1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to advertising, and more specifically, but not by way of limitation, to an online classified advertisement management and distribution system.
2. Description of Related Art
Many publications, such as newspapers and periodicals that have classified advertisement sections utilize legacy or proprietary classified advertisement systems for publishing classified advertisements. The proprietary classified advertisement systems basically operate as order entry systems that publishers of the periodicals utilize to generate, format, and price the advertisement text for a particular printed periodical, such as a newspaper, for an advertiser. As understood in the art, proprietary classified advertisement systems are close ended in that the systems are not designed to output to any output source other than the particular printed periodical for which the system was originally designed. The proprietary classified advertisement systems, generally, are operated by employees of the periodical, and provide the employee with pricing information so that the employee can inform the advertiser of the classified advertisement of a price for the classified advertisement. The price is typically based on format, number of lines, location, days of the week, duration of the advertisement, etc., for the particular periodical and format thereof.
The proprietary classified advertisement systems are designed for a single input, single output configuration. In other words, classified advertisements are input by an order entry person and output is directed to the particular periodical. While manufacturers of the proprietary classified advertisement systems have attempted to adapt the proprietary classified advertisement systems for external networks and electronic publishing, many difficulties have been encountered due to outdated implementations and undocumented maintenance of the proprietary classified advertisement systems over the years. Furthermore, the few proprietary classified advertisement systems that have capability of posting classified advertising data to the Internet transmit the data from a flat-file feed of having proprietary codes associated with advertisement text, manually parse and remove the proprietary codes, and apply a content markup language, such HTML. Performing such operation is time consuming and expensive for the publisher.
While there exists conventional online types of classified advertisement systems or auction systems, such as Ebay, these systems are limited with regard to the input/output capabilities. For example, the output of these systems are limited to Internet publishing and searching of the classified advertisements and listings. The conventional online classified systems are unable to directly format the classified advertisements for multiple device types at the point of entry.